I wish I had their frame for looking at outsourcing models long ago. On the Microsoft patterns & practices team, we regularly partnered with vendors around the world to scale our business while focusing on our core competencies. While I did manage to think through a lot of the issues and risks, I didn’t always have a great way of framing the conversations or recommendations. When you have names for the three outsourcing models, key distinctions for each, and a map of the main outsourcing objectives, it gets a lot easier to both think through decisions, and frame conversations for more effective outsourcing decisions.

Three Outsourcing Models According to Ross, Weill, and Robertson, there are three mutually exclusive outsourcing models: